Soca with Vybz

Die-hard soca fans are upset about a planned concert featuring Jamaican dancehall singer Vybz Kartel (Adidja Palmer) on Carnival Friday in 2025.

Protesting soca artiste Kevon "Yankey Boy" Heath argues that the event is taking bread out of the mouths of soca and calypso performers at the peak of their earning ability.

But this isn't only a problem for Carnival. Mr Heath himself admits he saw mas players dancing to dancehall at Brooklyn's Labour Day and Miami carnival this year.

This isn't a cultural problem. It's an issue with marketing, distribution, and cultural preservation.

The unassailable presence of soca in the weeks leading up to Carnival Monday and Tuesday and over those two days of street dancing prove its capacity for holding national attention. But the flood of music produced yearly has never become a catalogue that resonates with the wider public.

In January 2023, a mercifully unnamed soca artiste launched a social media broadside on radio stations, disc jockey, and his peers, arguing in profanity-laced rants that his work was being ignored.

At least he made a noise.

For decades, musicians, composers, and singers have worked on thousands of tracks for Carnival and releases across genres that remain largely invisible to local audiences.

Institutional memory is limited even among the songs that prove most popular in any given Carnival season.

The Scorch list of the best soca songs set off its own heated debates when it became clear that it focused almost entirely on songs released over the past two decades, with most of those created in the last ten years.

Soca as an expression of the calypso idiom is more than 50 years old now, but the selectors seemed deaf to this recent history.

This cultural amnesia, which targets our cultural output in general and our long history of creating music in particular, is not limited to soca.

Did any of the Scorch panelists know of Lovey’s String Band? They were a local band that became the first musicians of colour from the English-speaking Caribbean to be recorded in the US.

The national loss of the native musical heritage of these islands didn’t start with dancehall. Armies of local creators have been lost to history. Undocumented and unrecognised, their work was unheralded.

But this is 2024.

The fuss over Vybz Kartel should be met by local artistes working to capitalise on a fundamental shift in creative distribution, centered for now on YouTube which largely bypasses traditional gatekeepers to reach listeners and viewers directly.

Innovators at Monk Music are working on formalising channels in this realm. Others need to leave the picket line and understand exactly how Vybz Kartel remained relevant after years in a Jamaican prison.